15 Great English/Spanish Books for Kids

This book is about a girl whose hair grows to Rapunzel-like lengths overnight, looking almost like a palm tree. In a whimsical turn, her hair sprouts butterflies the next day, delighting everyone around her. With a beautiful focus on nature, this book has vibrant illustrations and short paragraphs that help tell its story. You can also listen to the author narrating the book in Spanish!

This is the story of Celia, a singer who moves to the U.S. from Cuba and creates a new type of music! The beautiful, slightly surreal images by renowned Mexican illustrator Rafael López drive the story home. My Name is Celia is a fun story, told in short paragraphs, to read to your children at nighttime. You can even listen to the author tell it in English and Spanish!

Written like an actual diary, this book is about a family’s journey across the border. One night Amada hears her parents say they will move from Mexico to the U.S. and that’s when she begins writing about what she dreams her life will be like, her hopes and fears. This book also uses short-ish paragraphs to tell the story, but with room to enjoy the illustrations by themselves. It’s a nice story about family, love and weathering change. 

This is the first picture book in this list that has a small amount of text in each page, focusing instead on the images themselves. If you like Sandra Cisneros you’re in for a treat, because this book is actually one of the chapters of The House on Mango Street! But it has these beautiful illustrations that really drive the fragment of the story home. If you haven’t read the book, this chapter talks about diversity and how everyone in the family has different hairstyles and skin tones. So this book is exactly that: a wonderful bit of prose that celebrates diversity and the little details that make us us. 

This book also has a shorter amount of text than the others (but a bit more compared to Hairs), and the format is a bit different. It doesn’t have the English/Spanish translations on the same page. Rather, it follows the narrator on her visits to her grandparents. With her paternal grandparents, she speaks English, but with her maternal abuelitos she speaks Spanish (they are Mexican American). Both visits show the differences between their cultures and heritages, both in the language and in the way they celebrate her birthday. This is a fun book, with beautiful watercolor illustrations, that shows the differences between families and the thing they all share: their unyielding love for their loved ones. 

This is a simple retelling of “The Turtle and the Hare” of Aesop’s Fables. But in this case, they race towards school, one on a bus and the other running. It’s a very simple illustrated story meant for young kids who are starting to read on their own. That’s why it’s a level 1 in the Green Light Readers series.

As a dinosaur kid myself, I would’ve loved this book. The illustrations are simple but cute and you get to see the almighty T-Rex in action. It’s about the biggest Tyrannosaurus and how all the other dinosaurs run and hide from him, except one: his granddaughter, who knows just how sweet he can be. It’s a short book, with a small amount of text but slightly more complex language. That’s why it’s a level 2 in the Green Light Readers series. It’s a very sweet story about family and appearances. 

This is another book with a simple storyline. After Daniel’s class finds an egg, they have fun letting their imagination run wild with possibilities. What could be inside of it? It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s probably not the second one! Whatever it is, kids can learn a good amount of vocabulary with this book, especially as it mentions several animals in both languages. Fun, short, and simple, this level 2 in the Green Light Readers series can help kids learn a ton of new words!

This one’s a bit different. For starters, it’s not one book, but a box with 25 eight-page books. It’s written to use as a Guided Reading Level D (first graders, more or less) so it’s not as challenging as other books. But, again, that is completely subjective and it depends on each kid. It also comes with a short parent guide. All the books in the box are bilingual too! So children will have plenty of stories for when they’re just beginning to read.  

This short book has six stories that show different quirky scenarios like strange neighbors or mystical science projects. At their core, all stories celebrate strong relationships with people, whether they are friends, family, or teachers. It also turns ordinary circumstances into extraordinary adventures that any child will love to read! All stories are short and they have some illustrations sprinkled around, which help kids form a mental picture of the story.

Lemon Grove is such a unique book! For those who don’t know, this is nonfiction and a great way to teach kids not only a second language but some history too. It follows Roberto, a kid who helped desegregate his school! Long story short, in the 1930s there was a school that wanted to segregate the Mexican American kids because of language “handicaps.” The community fought back and won the case against the court, thus bringing the children back to school. This is actually the first case of desegregation in the U.S.! It’s definitely worth reading.

This book is a sweet, loving tribute to the author’s family. It’s full of vibrant pictures and descriptions of moments in the author’s life. Like making empanadas with her family or cleaning nopales. Reading it feels like going through an old family photo album. It’s a great book for kids to read because it not only teaches them a language but it gives them quite a unique glimpse into the life of a Mexican American family! 

This book of folktales tells the magical stories that the villages of New Mexico have passed down through generations since the Spanish arrived in the continent. It is a collection of easy-to-read short stories that kids won’t have trouble understanding as they gain a deeper knowledge of the cultural heritage of the area. Some stories include La Llorona (you may know it as “The Weeping Woman”) and the title story, in which a woman convinces her husband it had snowed tortillas that night. 

This is one of the more advanced books in the list. For starters, it’s middle grade so it has more of a plot than the others. It follows an 11-year-old wrestling (or lucha libre) aficionado who one day discovers his connection to a renowned wrestler called the Guardian Angel. Fun adventures follow of course! It does have illustrations, but they don’t contribute much to the story. Nonetheless, this book is full of action, adventures and a story children can enjoy from beginning to end. 

This book follows Celeste, who after the death of her grandmother receives letters from her, along with some recipes that she used to cook. But that’s not all—Celeste also has to deal with issues like loss, bullying, and financial difficulties in her family. So the letters help her cope with all that is going on in her life. It is a sad but hopeful book that teaches children about Caribbean culture with the recipes that are included in the book, and at the same time how to deal with the pain of loss and overcoming hardships from growing up.